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Kamen Raida - Kaiki Kumo Otoko
episode 1 / Kamen Rider - The Mysterious Spiderman
Japan 1971
produced by Seiji Abe, Toru Hirayama for Ishinomori Productions, Toei/TV Asahi
directed by Koichi Takemoto
starring Hiroshi Fujioka, Akiji Kobayashi, Chieko Morikawa, Yoko Shimada, Kiyoshi Nonomura, Goro Naya (voice), Shinji Nakae (voice), Ryuji Saikachi (voice), Takashi Ueda, Hiroya Ishimaru, Eiji Maruyama
written by Masaru Igami, created by Shotaro Ishinomori, music by Shunsuke Kikuchi, visual effects by Sadao Iizuka
TV-series Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider (original TV show)
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Young Takeshi (Hiroshi Fujioka) isn't only a crack on the motorcycle,
he's also a biochemistry student with an alleged IQ of 600. This of course
makes him interesting to the evil organisation Shocker, who abduct him
from right under the nose of his motorcycling coach Tachibana (Akiji
Kobayashi) to make him one of their top cyborgs to be controlled by their
(yet anonymous) leader (voiced by Goro Naya). And Takeshi has already
physically been turned into a cyborg, but a scientist abducted by Shocker,
professor Midorikawa (Kiyoshi Nonomura) frees Takeshi before he can be
branwashed, and the two manage to escape Shocker headquarters thanks to
Takeshi's newly installed superpowers (which eventually also include a
costume and a flying motorcycle). With professor Midorikawa gone, shocker
want to get their hands on his daughter Ruriko (Chieko Morikawa), but
somehow Takeshi and Tachibana make up a plan to keep her out of the evil
organisation's plans - but instead of reuniting father and daughter,
Ruriko walks in on the professor being strangled - and she thinks by
Takeshi because she couldn't see the whole picture, as Shocker has sent a
monster, Spider Man, after the professor, whose strangling web she
couldn't see with her bare eyes, so she made the logical if wrong
assumption. Of course, later Takeshi sees that Spider Man gets his just
desserts, but the story might have set him forever at odds with Ruriko,
which is especially painful because he owes her father everything ... Over
the decades, Kamen Rider has developed into a multimedia
franchise in Japan and even beyond, but this is episode one of the series
that started it all - and frankly, seen from a nostalgic point of view,
it's great in its campiness ... but really, it's not all that good, its
action scenes are hardly above those from the Adam
West Batman series (without that series' self-irony), the
monsters look slightly ridiculous, and the plot formulaic. But still,
something about this series has hit a nerve with audiences, perhaps the
perfect mix of action, motorbike daredevelling, science fiction and
colourful costumes (including Kamen Rider himself who looks very much like
a grasshopper). But of course, from today's point of view, this all looks
terribly dated - but fun to watch all the same.
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